I am a Burmese exile taking a near-permanent refuge in New York and Sydney. Here are my essays about Burma and anything else I feel like writing about. And posting the articles I like from selected sites. Bridging Burma to the world this Blog is more of a Politically-Oriented Literary Blog than a Plain News Blog or a Sophisticated Thoughts Blog.

Monday, April 4, 2016

FGM: Pure Islamic Violence Against Girls

Supermodel
Waris Dirie was just five when she became a victim of FGM (female genital
mutilation). As she collects an award for her campaign against the practice,
she explains why it has to stop.

Waris Dirie was about five years old
when she was left in a makeshift shelter under a tree for several days to
recover from her "operation", like all the girls in her community,
she had undergone female circumcision, more accurately known as female genital
mutilation (FGM). She still remembers her anger.

"When they tried to convince me
that God wants this, I said: 'Did my God hate me so much?' I remember telling
my mother: 'If he hates me, then I don't want him.'" In the days after
FGM, many girls die from blood loss or infection. Dirie says she lay there,
talking to God, saying "make me stay alive. You owe me this now."

Dirie,
born to a nomadic family in Somalia, describes herself as not exactly the kind
of daughter dreamed of by the traditional families in her community. As a very
young child, she was wilful and headstrong, constantly questioning everything.
When she was about 13, her father announced that she would be married to a man
in his 60s.

"I
knew [most married women in her community] put up with everything and anything.
Any abuse, hopelessness, and I thought, was I here to be used and be abused? I
knew there was so much I could do with my life, but on my terms."

Her
terms have led to an extraordinary life and we meet in a London hotel room as
Dirie prepares to receive a Woman of the Year award for her campaign work.
Under the threat of her impending marriage, she ran away, running barefoot
across the desert for days until she reached relatives in Mogadishu.

From
there, she managed to make it to London – an aunt was married to Somalia's
ambassador to Britain – and she worked as their maid for several years. When
they returned to Somalia, she stayed on, learned English and got a job at
McDonald's, eventually being spotted by a photographer. By the 1990s, Dirie had
become a supermodel, fronting Chanel campaigns and appeared in the James Bond
film The Living Daylights.

Modelling
could be fun, but ultimately wasn't fulfilling. "I thought, 'This is
bullshit, fake.' I couldn't sleep one more night knowing the truth about what
was happening to girls and look all …" She gives a mock smile as if posing
in a fashion shoot.

"I
just knew that I had to tell the world that there was torture, an undercover
war against women. But this is not one person's war – all of us have to do
something." Now, she says, there is more awareness of FGM, but in the
1990s, "what really made me take a stand was that nobody was doing
anything".

Dirie's
profile had given her a voice and when she went public, in a magazine interview
in 1997, about what had happened to her, and her desire to stop FGM, largely
practised in communities in Africa, the Middle East and Asia, it created a
great deal of attention. She was appointed a UN special ambassador; in 2002,
she set up her Desert Flower Foundation to campaign against the practice.

The World Health Organisation estimates
there are about 140 million women in the world who have had FGM, from removal
of the clitoral hood to the whole excision of external genitalia before the
vagina is sewn up, with only a small hole left for urine and menstrual blood.

It usually happens before the age of 15,
and in some cases is performed on babies, in the belief that the girl will grow
up "clean", her "honour" intact along with her virginity as
a way of preparing her for marriage; this happens to 3 million girls every
year.

Aside from the intense pain and risk of
infection at the time, it carries lasting consequences: difficulty urinating,
sex is painful and pleasure-free, and childbirth can be fatal both to the baby
and the mother. Botched FGM can leave women doubly incontinent and ostracised
by their communities.

In
many countries, it is a crime, though one in the UK at least which has failed
to lead to any prosecutions. Why does she think so little has been done to
eradicate it? "Anything to do with females is considered less
important," she says. The other argument she hears is that it is a
"cultural" practice – tolerated on one side by people who don't want
to be seen as racist if they interfere; ignored on the other side by people who
are not interested because it doesn't affect them.

"If
a white man or woman saw a white child that is mutilated, there would be
screaming. I guarantee it would end," she says. "This is abuse
against a child, so to say this is your 'thing', it's to do with your religion
or race, it's all wrong. This is about child protection. I don't see anything
else, and I think it's covered up by racism, and the idea that 'I don't want to
get involved'. It's pure violence against girls, and it destroys the rest of
their lives. And for what? For who?"

It
also doesn't help that the practice is so hidden. "As long as the problem
stays undercover then nothing much happens, or at least not fast enough,"
says Dirie. "If we put it into the open, if it's on TV and in the
newspaper, if we have politicians and religious leaders talking about it and
saying no, then we fight it together."

It isn't only something that happens in
rural communities in Africa or Asia. This summer, the NSPCC opened its first
helpline to support girls at risk of FGM in the UK – figures are difficult to
come by, but one study estimates there are 66,000 women in England and Wales
living with FGM, and 20,000 girls are at risk.

It
happens in immigrant communities, says Dirie, "because first of all the
community stick together. They bring the same behaviour, even though they live
right here in London. So the child doesn't know any different but follows the
rule of the parent and what they think is the right thing. We need teachers,
doctors, social workers, the police – all these people have to be informed,
open and talk to the community."

Last
month, in Berlin, Dirie opened the first of what will be several medical
centres to offer women who have endured FGM reconstructive surgery. Over the
next year or so, she hopes to open other clinics in Kenya, Ethiopia, the
Netherlands and Switzerland. But she says, "I don't want to put too much
focus on it, because the whole point is to stop this mutilation in the first
place. We don't have to have special hospitals to reconstruct a God-given
thing."

She
would like to do other things – sing, act, be a fashion designer for women of
all shapes and sizes. "But then I think I can't turn back, not now I'm
almost there. You just have to keep going until one day it will come to an
end."

Dirie,
now 48 and living in Poland with her four children, says the emails and calls
from suicidal women, and the knowledge that thousands of girls are still
enduring FGM every day, still makes her angry and can be exhausting. But she is
hopeful. "The world is changing, especially with technology, [people have
access to] any information. I don't want little girls to be like me, to travel
the world to find out that this doesn't happen [to all women] and what has
happened is wrong."

Ninety
five percent of girls there in Somalia undergo the brutal FGFM procedure. Somali
Prime Minister Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke now says he is “committed” to
ending FGM. After hearing an outpouring of concern from more than 1 million
protesters, the prime minister of Somalia has vowed to put an end to female
genital mutilation.

Somalia has one of the highest rates of
FGM worldwide — an estimated 95 percent of girls there undergo the procedure,
according to UNICEF. While a number of leaders there have tried banning the
practice, advocates may have gotten their strongest support to date when Prime
Minister Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke said he’s now “committed” to stopping
FGM.

“I’m
committed to outlaw FGM in Somalia through legislation, advocacy, education and
community engagement to confront the social norms that encourage the FGM
practices within the society,” Sharmarke said earlier this month in response to
a campaign launched by Avaaz, the organization told The Huffington Post.

Prime
Minister Omar Abdirashid Ali Sharmarke meets with representatives from Avaaz
regarding a petition to outlaw female genital mutilation, which collected more
than 1 million signatures.

Avaaz,
a platform that aims to empower people to take action on global issues,
launched a petition that praised the government of Puntland, a region in
northeast Somalia, for banning FGM. But it also called on the country’s central
government to issue legislation that would outlaw the practice entirely.

As
of Thursday afternoon, the Ban-FGM petition collected 1.2 million signatures.

FGM
involves the partial or total removal of the external female genitalia for no
medical benefit and comes with a slew of health risks. It can cause severe bleeding,
lead to problems urinating, cysts, infections and complications in childbirth,
among other issues, according to WHO.

The
procedure was officially banned by the U.N. in 2012, and Somalia has taken
steps to put an end to it. But the procedure is still widely practiced in
Somalia and other parts of the world. In 2012, Somalia indicated it would ban
the practice, but additional measures were still needed to be put forth,
experts said.

To
solidify the movement, the country’s Ministry of Women Affairs and Human Rights
announced in August that it would introduce a law that would ban FGM
altogether, Somali news outlet Horseed Media reported.

“Time
has come for us to eradicate this bad practice and protect the rights of girls
and women in our country,” Sahra Mohammed Ali Samatar, minister of Women
Affairs, said at a conference. Even with such fanfare, experts say the
government needs greater pressure from advocates worldwide in order to be
fomented into taking tangible steps.

Waris
Dirie, an advocate and former model whose face has graced Chanel ads, is hoping
her star power will help push the Avaaz campaign forward. Dirie, a native of
Somalia, who was cut when she was 5 years old, has publicly rejected the
tradition and recalled the intense pain and rage she felt as a result. She has
urged supporters to sign the petition to create a “global wave” against the
practice.

“It’s pure violence against girls, and
it destroys the rest of their lives,” Dirie told The Guardian in 2013. “And for
what? For who?”